The psychology of collapse: Why Don't Look Up is a Movie for Our Time
At the very least, director Adam McKay’s movie Don’t Look Up deserves credit for getting Academy Award-winning actor Timothée Chalamet to say “I f**king love fingerling potatoes” and get us to believe he means it. McKay’s film took pop culture by storm upon its release by streaming giant Netflix in December 2021, quickly becoming one of the most-watched original movies in the history of the site.
The film, which takes satirical aim at American culture, government, and media, has generated its fair share of controversy from reviewers and fans. It’s easy to argue about the merits of the film, but its popularity is undeniable, in part due to its star-studded cast, but also because of its incisive commentary of what it means to live in a world on the brink of collapse and the question of how we ought to respond to it.
For those who have not yet seen Don’t Look Up, I would advise you to go watch it before you read this article. But for the uninitiated, here’s the premise as described by Rotten Tomatoes:
Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), an astronomy grad student, and her professor Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) make an astounding discovery of a comet orbiting within the solar system. The problem: it's on a direct collision course with Earth. The other problem? No one really seems to care.
The film follows Kate (Lawrence) and Dr. Mindy (DiCaprio) as they attempt to convince the government, media, and people that their lives are in mortal danger, to very little avail. Director Adam McKay lampoons the state of our social institutions to warn about the real-life threats posed by climate change, misinformation, and politicians and journalists who are uninterested in working for solutions.
In the film, the government is run by nepotistic, solipsistic fools, and the media care far more about clicks than any high-minded appeal to truth. In fact, Kate Dibiasky (Lawrence) is vilified by the media, including her journalist ex-boyfriend who uses their relationship to boost his own career. As for the ordinary Americans depicted in the film, celebrity gossip and conspiracy theories occupy far more public attention than their impending doom. Almost every character in the movie is vapid, materialistic, and ruthlessly self-interested. The satire of modern America is pretty obvious: a country relentlessly bombarded by sensational media and conspiracy theories marches blindfolded off a cliff.
As a film, Don’t Look Up is not quite as smart as it would like to be. Director Adam McKay approaches American culture writ large from a framework of deliberate obtuseness. The media figures, politicians, tech executives, and other powerful figures are all portrayed as cartoonishly stupid and incompetent, as though the protagonists of McKay’s 2008 comedy Stepbrothers were suddenly running the country. As a premise it has some appeal, but it ultimately fails to deliver genuinely interesting insights. After all, the joy of satire lies in its sharpness, and the lack thereof from McKay in this case weighs down the film’s comedy with repetitive jokes. At the same time, the film deserves a great deal more credit than most reviewers have given it (the film currently sits at 56% on Rotten Tomatoes). McKay shines a poignant mirror on the social unrest and political polarization that defines American life amid a pandemic. Plenty of ink has been spilled on the movie’s shortcomings, but the best parts of the film–and perhaps the reason it has struck a chord with viewers–are deeply personal meditations on what it means to live through a society in the throes of collapse, and the effect that such reality has on our collective psyche.
The Psychology of Collapse
Early in the film, before news of the comet has broken and as Dr. Mindy (DiCaprio) is just beginning to grapple with his own impending doom, he calls his wife (Melanie Lynskey) who updates him on the normal goings-on of everyday family life. She exclaims “Marshall got a 172 on his LSATs and we’re celebrating!” The destruction of the planet is imminent, but the family still celebrates exam scores. There’s a sort of morbid irony in that scene and other such moments of relative normalcy throughout the film. After all, how could law school admissions matter when the planet is about to be blown up? However, those moments are some of the most touching and human parts of the movie. They shine a mirror on the reality of living through (to borrow a phrase that has been beaten to death over the last two years) unprecedented times, where widespread death and social upheaval are the new norm.
As we certainly know by now, the world doesn’t stop turning when something bad happens. To take just one example, the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021 shocked the world. But the next day was just another Thursday, with meetings to be held, school to be attended, and lives to be lived. We are left to grapple with outrageous events amidst the almost-comical normalcy of day-to-day life. In light of this, I was reminded of a passage from a 2020 essay by Indi Samarajiva, a Sri Lankan writer who lived through his country’s civil war and describes what it means to live through societal collapse:
If you’re waiting for a moment where you’re like “this is it,” I’m telling you, it never comes. Nobody comes on TV and says “things are officially bad.” There’s no launch party for decay. It’s just a pileup of outrages and atrocities in between friendships and weddings and perhaps an unusual amount of alcohol.
Perhaps you’re waiting for some moment when the adrenaline kicks in and you’re fighting the virus or fascism all the time, but it’s not like that. Life is not a movie, and if it were, you’re certainly not the star. You’re just an extra. If something good or bad happens to you it’ll be random and no one will care. If you’re unlucky you’re a statistic. If you’re lucky, no one notices you at all.
Collapse is just a series of ordinary days in between extraordinary bullshit, most of it happening to someone else. That’s all it is.
According to Samarajiva, the collapse of America as we know it is not something that is on the horizon. It’s already here, partially because of the pandemic, but also because of broader political and social unrest. At the same time, most people live pretty ordinary lives. Most of us aren’t thinking about disaster, we’re thinking about what we’ll eat for lunch, or what we’ll do this weekend. Things don’t usually feel apocalyptic. But as Samarajiva writes: “if you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.”
Given that context, it’s easier to understand why the apocalyptic narrative of Don’t Look Up resonates with viewers’ experience. The film’s popularity (it has become the second most-watched original movie in Netflix’s history) goes much deeper than McKay’s climate change metaphor built to appeal to Very Online Liberals. Certainly the star-studded cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, and Timothée Chalamet (just to name a few) doesn’t hurt. But I think the film resonates as it does because McKay gives a voice to all the pain, frustration, confusion, and distrust of elites and one another that has characterized the last two years. Such honesty is refreshing, even when it comes in a highly ironic and self-referential package. Furthermore, the little attempts at normalcy in the film (culminating in a family dinner at the literal end of the world) characterize the sometimes gut-wrenching effort to carry on amid destruction. COVID-19 has killed 860,000 Americans and counting, not to mention the indirect effects of lockdowns and collective lack of socialization. Amid this bleak reality, apocalypse movies hit us close to home.
Something Worth Saving
The question then becomes: where do we go with this? What ought we do amid social collapse? I reject the nihilistic attitude that says we should just sit back and watch the show. But I also reject McKay’s proposed solution. For McKay, the assumption seems to be that if we just trust the science and follow the facts, we can pull ourselves out of the mess that we are in. Certainly, there is truth to the idea that we can and should be making better policy choices to keep ourselves from going further down a destructive path.
But McKay crucially misses the dimension of introspection and moral reasoning without which we truly are doomed to failure. The question that matters most, and the one Don’t Look Up fails to ask, is: what does it mean to live a good life amid such apparent decay and disillusionment? The film is so focused on looking up or down that it fails to look inward. This is not to say that we should ignore scientific facts or bury our heads in the sand. But facts alone can only get us so far. As the English writer C.S. Lewis wrote in his 1944 book The Abolition of Man, “From propositions about fact alone, no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved.” McKay’s warning about a society doomed to fall forgets to ask the crucial question about whether or not any of this is worth preserving.
The closest the film comes to such introspection limits itself to validation—the message that your feelings about all of this are understandable. The character of Kate (Lawrence), who seems to be the stand-in for the educated under-30 crowd (presumably a big part of the film’s target audience), talks openly about crying five times per day. She is shunned from public life after an emotional outburst on national TV, and Dr. Mindy (DiCaprio) attempts to console her by telling her that “everyone should be panicking right now.” Emotional validation, while an important tool for responding to traumatic events, fails in and of itself to really get to the heart of the matter. To stop at mere validation is to focus too much on what our reactions are, and not enough on what our responses ought to be. Dr. Mindy’s validation of Kate’s panic and emotionality serve little purpose other than to exacerbate the characters’ sense of victimhood (and vicariously the viewers’ sense of victimhood), distracting us from a more productive, purposeful response to collapse. Just like Kate in the film, this mindset ultimately leads us to hopelessness, despair, and nihilism.
The truly damning indictment of American society presented by Don’t Look Up isn’t the funhouse-mirror caricature of the elite, nor is it the misinformation machine that turns the masses against plain scientific facts. It’s the fact that nobody–not even the “sympathetic” characters–stops for one second to consider questions of value, worth, good, or evil. Like animals being led to the slaughterhouse, it’s just a cycle of stimulus and response until the end of the world.
In Closing
As a satire of America in the 2020s, Don’t Look Up provides a pertinent diagnosis of our national ailments. But more than anything, it’s a lesson in what not to do when seeking a cure. McKay identifies the sense of dread and doom that can cause us to give in to panic, made manifest in the main characters’ impulsive sense of alarm, but he fails to interrogate such an impulse in the first place. Apocalyptic scenarios ought to make us more attentive, not less, to whether we are willing to behave like rational and moral creatures or if we are going to limit ourselves to the base emotions of fear and panic. In the face of uncertainty and danger, we need a healthy dose of something we rarely hear about in public life: courage.
I will once again borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, who writes that “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” When we reach the “testing point,” the point at which our situation is most desperate and our desire to surrender our virtue is highest, courage allows us to persevere. Our willingness to hold fast to that which is actually meaningful and valuable to us–whether it be God, family, country, or something else entirely–matters most at this testing point, not least. It is at the moment when our existence is most threatened that we must choose to live lives that are worth saving.